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An anonymous reader writes "After months of back and forth legal filings, Amazon and Apple have finally ended their ongoing dispute centering on Amazon's use of the term 'App Store.' As part of the agreement, Apple agreed to drop the suit and Amazon promised not to counter-sue Apple in the future. Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet said that 'we no longer see a need to pursue our case. With more than 900,000 apps and 50 billion downloads, customers know where they can purchase their favorite apps.' Apple initially sued Amazon back in March of 2011 alleging that the online retailer's use of the phrase 'App Store' in its mobile software developer program constituted trademark infringement. Apple expressed that allowing Amazon to continue to use the phrase 'App Store' would ultimately confuse consumers who associate the phrase with Apple's app store for iOS apps."

Apple are fucking stupid. They go around suing every other large company around alienating themselves and making a lot of enemies when they could be forming valuable partnerships instead.

That makes far too much sense. And to top it off, where such a philosophy would have been normal in the early days of the personal computer industry, cooperation between businesses to where everyone can succeed does not align with the modern douchebag corporate philosophy, where it is not enough for a company to be a success, but all competitors must ultimately fail. And if that is not possible, scorch the land.

That makes far too much sense. And to top it off, where such a philosophy would have been normal in the early days of the personal computer industry, cooperation between businesses to where everyone can succeed does not align with the modern douchebag corporate philosophy, where it is not enough for a company to be a success, but all competitors must ultimately fail. And if that is not possible, scorch the land.

I am sure that is the reason they dropped it and not because they were throwing dollars at lawyers for a case they couldn't possibly win. They found a way to back out gracefully.

Or could it be that over the intervening time, Apple figured out that their customers are not as stupid as Apple thought they were, and none of them were found trying to download Amazon apps to their walled-garden phones?

Apple expressed that allowing Amazon to continue to use the phrase 'App Store' would ultimately confuse consumers

I am sure that is the reason they dropped it and not because they were throwing dollars at lawyers for a case they couldn't possibly win. They found a way to back out gracefully.

Or could it be that over the intervening time, Apple figured out that their customers are not as stupid as Apple thought they were, and none of them were found trying to download Amazon apps to their walled-garden phones?

Or maybe Apple saw that even Android users aren't stupid enough to shop at the fake App Store. Not to mention that most developers too realized Amazon was ripping them off.

I am sure that is the reason they dropped it and not because they were throwing dollars at lawyers for a case they couldn't possibly win. They found a way to back out gracefully.

The thing is, Apple can afford to keep throwing lawyers that cost thousands of dollars per hour at cases they have no hope of winning.

More likely they found out they would be judged against very, very soon and would rather the case ended ambiguously as opposed to having a precedent set. This way they can keep using the FUD and threats of a law suit.

The above referenced wikipedia article indicates that as of May 2013, the Play Store had somewhere in the realm of 48 billion downloads (up from 40 billion in April 2013). It would be relatively safe to assume that if the number of downloads went up by 8 billion in one month, that exceeding 50 billion by today's date (over a month later) would not be far fetched.

I bet a shiny quarter that somewhere in the agreement, Apple gets a break on the 1-click purchase license that Amazon got the patent on way back when. Apple was among the first, if not the first, to license that farce for their store online.

Bet they didnt. What Apple got was that hopefully the DOJ will not consider this lawsuit a pattern of behavior when considering their culpability in the eBook price fixing investigation.

That ship has sailed, and the brunt of that eBook pricing scandal will hit any day now.Don't expect Apple to get out of that one so easily, because the last party to settle in this type of case pays something like 90% of the damages.

Not saying they are going to walk away from it. More like putting one's effects in order before sentencing. It cant hurt to put this to bed before the judge rules, just like it cant help to have a merit-less lawsuit against the Amazon in play when the judge rules. Hey maybe Im wrong, probably am, but the timing seems less than random. But either way I doubt they got any concession from Amazon whatsoever, and certainly no reduction in licensing fees.

I'll bet they didn't. The press release mentions Amazon agreed not to counter sue, That's usually code for we are losing the case and we talked the other side into not going after legal fees if we drop the case right now.

The case was silly, Amazon would have likely counter sued and at a minimum won legal fees and might have convinced the judge the case was so silly that punitive damages are viable. That could cost quite a bit of money so they talked Amazon into letting them off the hook if they drop it and

Yes, I can totally see, how a misguided Apple user would download stuff from Amazon to his iPhone instead of using Apple's app store - well, except for the minor problem, that their phones do not allow them to do it.

Clearly you overestimate the median intelligence of the Apple user. Apple had to weigh the cost of a lawsuit, against the cost of fielding support calls from iPhone/iPad users upset that they couldn't figure out how to download apps from Amazon's App Store.

Apple are not stupid, they didn't become the #1 market cap company (now #2 I think, but still) for being stupid. I do think however that not every move is a winner (keeping AD2P out of their bluetooth stack in ALL of their products becuase they make more selling earbuds, for example), including suing anyone who breathes one of their more generic trademark phrases, and their Chinese slave labor camps. Still, people are willing to pony up for their products.

At the time in question, Windows was not an operating system. It was a windowing system that ran on their operating system, which contrary to popular usage was not just called "DOS" because that's also a generic descriptor of any disk operating system -- it was specifically MS-DOS, like Apple's app stores are specifically the iOS App Store and the Mac App Store.

So Windows was software which gave your computer windows, in the same way that The App Store (whichever one) is a store where you buy apps. Both equ

I haven't heard anything this idiotic since Microsoft was allowed to trademark "Windows" to cover their particular version of already well and long-established concept of a computerized windowing system.